Undone
by atypist
Summary: A compilation of Eames and Goren drabbles. Written from Eames. "Go back" is new
1. wildly inappropriate

**[prompt]** write wildly inappropriate Eames.

*  
_  
Fuck this fucking day._

I'm sitting at my desk, forehead resting on my hands. I've kept my mouth shut through a lot of shit today, and I'm praying that nothing's going to jump during these last 10 minutes of my shift.

"Detective," Ross yells at me practically through his door. I don't even jump. In fact, I remain seated not moving. I can hear the surprise in his voice when he has to elaborate and says, "In here now."

Slowly I push away from my desk and make my way to his office. I do not present myself all open and amenable in front of him. I linger, with my foot half way out his door. "Captain."

"Where's your partner?" he asks my least favorite question to be asked, which is strangely also an often asked question of me.

"I've got no fucking idea," I reply, my voice soft, my tone a lot more neutral than my words.

"What?"

"I've got no fucking idea, Captain." I repeat, adding a touch of sarcastic formality to my reply by including his rank.

"I need to speak with him." Ross looks peeved.

"Well, then why are you speaking with me?" I ask what I think to be the obvious. Now Ross looks astounded.

"Cause you're here and he's not." He surprises me by responding. I know I should ask about what's going on, I tell myself I should care. But not today, not right now, I do not fucking care. I've had it with this day. "Find him." Ross commands me.

I look at the clock. 5 minutes. I walk over to Ross's desk, snatch up the receiver to his phone, dial Goren's cell phone number and hand the receiver to Ross. "Found."


	2. young

*****note. These are not connected like chapters, these are a series of drabbles around different ideas. Enjoy.

**[prompt]** write a young Eames, 2 months away from being 18

*

I open my mouth to his as he presses me back against the wall outside the front door to my house. He's giggling and high and horny. I'm two of the three. His tongue feels good against mine, his lips are hard on my mouth, his hands fumbling across my breasts. I can feel his knee pressing my legs open, pressing into me.

"I have to go," I mumble as he continues to kiss me and rub against me and… "Inside, I have to." I'm twisting away from him, still giggling as he kisses and feels me and fumbles against me. "I'm late, like 2 hours late." I kiss him back again, opening my legs to his leg.

"Better two hours late than late," he's kissing my neck as he makes a bad joke about all the sex we've been having.

"Right," I give him one last kiss as he gives me one last feel before I tumble as quietly as I can through my front door.

I lock the door behind me, the house is quiet. I'm thinking my parents are asleep. I take my time walking back down the hall toward the kitchen. As I pass the den, my heart stops in my chest as I recognize the outline of my Dad sitting in his chair in front of the coffee table. Unwillingly I stop. Busted.

"Dad," I say, my voice quavering a bit. He doesn't look up, and I realize he's got little idea I'm standing there. I see that he has his weapon disassembled on the table in front of him, his cleaning stuff arrayed nearby. He looks at me, blankly for a moment, as if he doesn't recognize me. He hasn't been home in something like 24 hours. He looks like he's aged 24 years. "Sorry," I say, talking about coming home late.

"Me too," he replies and looks back at his gun.

I understand what he meant a lot better today. That day is in his record, in his file, in what I know about my father because I'm on the job. Discharged his weapon in the line of duty. A good shoot, they ruled it. But still, the only man my dad ever killed.


	3. bed time

**[prompt]** write Eames at bed time

*

As the light goes out in the bedroom, I realize that Joe's gone to bed. I look at the clock, just after 2am. I've got a day shift tomorrow, several court appearances. I need to get in bed as well, get some sleep.

By the ambient light in the bedroom I see his tshirt and sweats in a ball on the floor. I pick them up by moving my right foot underneath them and quietly kicking them into the air. I catch the shirt and let the sweats fall back to my feet. Silently I wriggle out of my clothes and underthings and move into his tshirt. It's warm and it smells like him and its soft and it caresses me like him.

I pad across the floor and slip under the covers. I listen for a moment to his even breathing. He turns, already half asleep, and pulls me into his arms. "Why do you always do that?" he asks, his voice husky. I think about his shirt, about how I like to sleep in his things.

"Why do I like to sleep in your shirt?" My fingertips trace the outline of his face as we lay intimately wrapped together in the dark.

"No, why do you always put on my shirt and make me have to take it back off again," his voice is a whispery laugh in my ear as I feel his hands on my hips, on the flat plane of my stomach, across the swell of my breasts, as he pushes his shirt up and off my body again.

"Foreplay," I whisper in return.


	4. sleep

**[prompt]** sleep

*

_Once upon a time, in a great castle_…

I'm standing in the doorway of the victim's bedroom. I cannot seem to bring myself to walk inside. I'm not ready to disrupt the scene. The victim is female, 17 maybe 18, jet black hair, pale snow skin, dark lips, dark lashes. She's posed on top of the blankets, arms crossed over her chest. She could be asleep, except for the stillness of her chest.

"Eames," my partner mumbles as he pushes by me shoving me up against the door jamb. He's snapping his gloves into place, his eyes on the victim. My eyes travel away and around the room. I look beyond the bedroom and can see a prescription bottle of pills on the adjoining bathroom counter. Suicide?

The room feels incongruous with the victim's age. It's frilly and young, a canopy bed, like a princess, not like a teenager nearly finished with high school. This is not the only strange detail, the step-mother is barely older than this girl and seems strangely detached, and the father is absent, away on business.

I look back to my partner leaning over the body, his face close to hers, examining her eyes, her lips. I know Goren is all about the evidence, but his proximity is creepy, fairy tale creepy, like a kiss. Involuntarily I shiver, snapping my thoughts back into focus.

"Overdose," Goren mutters, gesturing to barely perceptible residue of foamy saliva around the mouth, the only thing marring the perfect staging.

"She could be asleep," I voice my thought from earlier, remaining in the doorway, my eyes shifting back to the prescription bottle of pills. Goren walks across the room and reads the label.

"Started out that way," he acknowledges revealing the bottle is probably some kind of sleeping pill prescription. "You know, they're not really asleep in the fairy tales." I'm not surprised that Goren seems able to read my mind. He's got that way about him, we've got that way.

"Yeah, I know, they're dead."


	5. heart

**[prompt]** Heart

*

"Alex, how are you today?" my shrink asks me. Uncharacteristically he's behind his desk, wrapping something up on his computer screen. I made the appointment a few hours ago; it's not my regular visit. We've reopened Joe's case at work, investigating the death of Joe's former partner Kevin Quinn. Bobby's like a dog with a bone. He knows something's up. He thinks we've put the wrong guy away. I think I can't breathe or think or move.

"I'm here," I reply as if that should sum it up.

"That's not necessarily a bad thing," he finishes what he's doing and moves around to sit in the chair where he usually sits. I remain standing.

"Well, it doesn't feel good to me." I breathe in deeply and exhale slowly.

"So, tell me what's going on."

"My niece, she was born with a hole in her heart," I say as I walk over to the window to look out at the city streets about 20 floors below me.

"You have a new niece?" he asks, surprise evident in his tone. I'm not sure what he thought I was going to say.

"No, she's a teenager now."

"With a hole in her heart," in that shrinky way, he repeats what I've already said.

"Well, not anymore," I reply. "A ventrical septal defect. It closed on its own, over time." I supply, remembering my brother and sister-n-law struggling with the information, struggling to decide what to do, buckling under the strain of deciding to wait and not pursue the surgical option.

"What does it feel like, to have a hole in your heart?" my shrink asks, now he's picking up on things, getting in the game.

"Maybe, like you can't catch your breath." I say, thinking that was one of the things I remembered my brother saying, irregular breathing, fatigue, something about the blood passing from one ventricle to the other and on to the lungs.

"How do you feel Alex?"

"Like I have a hole in my heart." And I wonder if mine is going to solve itself on its own.


	6. footedness

**[prompt]** What question do you most dread?

*

"Eames, you awake?" Goren asks into the phone. I hate that question, I dread that question. Whenever I get asked that question I'm being woken up in the middle of the night.

"What?" My voice is hoarse, almost unintelligible as I attempt to reply into the phone.

"You awake?"

"Why?" I sigh, rolling over onto my back in bed, I cannot bring myself to open my eyes and look at the clock. I was dead asleep. Deep, deep, asleep. Middle of the night asleep. Which seems fairly reasonable, seeing as it is the middle of the night.

"I was thinking, it's not the brother."

"Why's that?" My sleepy brain plays along, I was also thinking it's not the brother, but I'm fairly certain my reasons are entirely different from my partner's. We often land in the same place; we just take two different roads.

"The brother's right footed."

"What?" Goren says some fairly unexpected things in the course of navigating a case, but phoning me in the middle of the night to talk about footedness rates up there.

"Right footed, he leads with his right foot."

"Is there such a thing as footedness?" I ask, disbelieving.

"Eames," his voice is impatient, like I've just asked a stupid question. "The footprints, they lead with the left foot."

"Yes, they do." I agree on that point. At least this whole footedness thing explains why Goren had the suspect walking all over the interrogation room, starting and stopping and turning. I thought Goren was just trying to rankle the guy. Turns out, Goren was studying footedness.

"It was the nephew." He continues. "The nephew, he's left footed."

"Of course he is." I roll over onto my side, snuggling my head into my pillow.

"You noticed that too?" Goren sounds almost jubilant that I might have noticed the nephew's footedness. I of course, did not.

"Where are you?" I'm now looking at the clock next to my bed. 3:46am.

"Why?" His reply is evasive, meaning he's not at home, he's not at the squad.

"No reason. I think it's the nephew as well." I let my question go.

"Because he's left footed?"

"No, the shoe. I stopped by on my way out and the lab guys had narrowed the shoe type to a few possibilities. They said we'd have the complete report in the morning. The types they had in the queue just seemed more like the nephew."

"The shoe type?" I can hear Goren smile.

"Yeah, the shoe type. You think we can convict on footedness?" I ask, thinking his reasoning is just as loose as mine.

"Footedness is far more empirical than the shoe seeming more like the nephew's style." He replies.

"Of course it is." I'm not going to debate footedness with my partner on the phone at almost 4 in the morning. "We'll have the reports in the morning, a search will hopefully turn up the shoes and we can connect them to the nephew."

"On shoe type." Goren seems distracted.

"And footedness, though, I'll let you add that to the report." This time it's my turn to smile, I'm not even certain _footedness_ is a word.


	7. terror

**[prompt]** terror

*

Grief slips in feeling like a cold front that settles in the bone marrow. It resides there like a disease, tapping your energy. Terror is something altogether different.

When two homicide detectives from Joe's precinct came knocking on my door, I didn't even think to grab anything to cover myself up. I yanked the door open with little regard that I was standing in my nightgown. I knew what it meant for them to be standing there, and the fact that I was half naked seemed of little consequence. They stood, mouths open, no sound coming out. I stood facing them, the same way, mouth open, no sounding coming out. One of them finally found some words and managed to convey that Joe was in critical condition. I pulled on my khakis and a sweater straight on over my night gown. I brought my socks and shoes in hand, following them out to their car barefoot.

Joe made it through the night and into the next day, though he never regained consciousness. He slipped away from me along the same path that sorrow creeped inside of me. I laid my palm across his forehead and kissed his temple. I couldn't feel my hands, I couldn't feel him underneath my hands, I couldn't feel as someone grabbed me away from him and moved me out of his room and into the hall where a billion officers stood, their grief on their faces. I looked away. I couldn't look anyone in their eyes, I couldn't absorb what they were feeling, I could barely absorb what I was feeling.

Grief turns to fever in your brain and makes time slip and slide in a strange fashion. I was at my parents' house setting the table for a family dinner. I had buried Joe weeks ago. I counted the plates and counted the chairs and we were one off, one missing, one gone. The plates crashed to the floor at the same time I crashed to the floor, as if I had no bones or muscle or air. My mom rushed from the kitchen and fell to her knees bringing me into her arms, broken china splattered all over the dining room floor. She grabbed my face and forced me to look into eyes. It was the first time I had looked into anyone's eyes in all those weeks. I turned myself off, suspended all belief when I was ushered out of Joe's room, and had lived in the inbetween for the last however many days. And in that moment, setting the damn table, the terror of losing Joe hit me white hot like lightning, left me shaking, left me empty, left me sobbing in my mother's arms.


	8. go back

**[prompt]** It was there, in one moment, words uttered that cannot be erased. If the chance were given, what would you go back and not say?

*

"Where's the kid?" My voice is strangely slow and even. I can feel my heart beating, wild.

"I hit a ball." The guy is looking at me like I'm crazy. I can hear my partner Goren getting out of the passenger side of the SUV. His heavy uneven footfalls fast, moving toward the front of the cars.

"Where's the kid?" I repeat the question again, this time more breath than sound. Frantically I'm scanning the yard, the driveways, the area where the ball could have come from.

"I hit a ball, it cracked my windshield." The guy is running his hand through his hair, exasperated, annoyed.

"Balls just don't come from no where." I'm not looking where I should be looking. "Where's the kid, the kid who belongs to that ball." I heard the impact of the ball on the windshield, the thump, the crack, the screeching of the car's breaks in front of me. I slammed on my breaks and came within inches of rear ending the guy.

"I hit a ball." This time the guy's voice is faltering. "I hit a ball." He repeats, his voice breaking. "I hit a ball." Barely a voice at all. I can hear Goren behind me kneeling down practically underneath the car calling it in.

Irrational. Maybe if I hadn't asked the question, maybe if I could go back and not say… where's the kid?


End file.
